My blueprints, and my self-made pieces of furniture are well-known to the Slovene public, both to laymen and those more technically informed; a fame that further inflated with the chair I have made for the Pope's visit in Slovenia last year. Some
like my things very much, some do not particularly like them, and yet others rely on their fellow humans' opinions. All in all, this too is normal and to be expected.

In the time since I made my first wooden item, numerous, indeed countless new chairs have been made in Slovenia. It would seem that there was more advancement in this particular field of design than ever before in national history, since the times of the Gosposvetsko polje throne (about 950 A.C.).

This particular manufacture is the domain of architects, the architectural and design schools, the mentors and their students, with important interferences on the part of painters and sculpturers. The reason, however, for this particular outburst of chair-mania in Slovenia may well be in the spirit of the time itself, in the changed attitude towards the object, the chair, in a moment when designing for wide masses transcends into a search for individually bounded identity. In this context, the eternal and proverbial "chair for all times and purposes" is replaced by brand new, if numerous, new chairs that demonstrate the search for artistic trial and expression to suit a specific market, specific buyers, even specific collectors and connoisseurs.

With all that in mind, it is perhaps not too preposterous to say that my work had been an important impulse for many authors who followed suit. It is my impression that many thought at some point, "If Suhadolc can do it, why shouldn’t I give it a try" I am flattered to be able to think that my work indeed triggered many a "chair action" in Slovenia. They certainly demonstrate a variety of concepts, materials, and manufacture, quite in accord with the pluralist times we live in.

Janez Suhadolc